Laboratory Studies - Dune Worlds: How Windblown Sand Shapes Planetary Landscapes - page 201

Fig. 17.11 The Aarhus Mars Wind tunnel is a large chamber in
which low-pressure gas is recirculated. A large number of portholes
and cable feed-throughs are needed to access the interior with
instrumentation, although this is a small price to pay for not having to

pump down the entire building. Note the tunnel sits on rollers, so
sections can be separated to adjust equipment inside (or clean it of
dust!). Photo courtesy of Jon Merrison

Fig. 17.12 The inside of the
Aarhus tunnel (when it was
unusually clean). The large fans
needed to drive the low-density
air are visible at top and bottom.
Photo courtesy of Jon Merrison

Ames, various university groups have developed smaller-
scale facilities to test instrumentation in Mars conditions.
The University of Oxford has a transient low-pressure
tunnel for anemometer testing, although the authors are
aware of no aeolian investigations with it.
At the University of Aarhus in Denmark, a facility
(Fig. 17.11 ) has been built in a large vacuum chamber to
simulate Mars conditions with winds. The wind is generated
by a set of large recirculating fans (Fig. 17.12 ). A range of
studies on dust-lifting, including triboelectric effects, has

been performed, and instrumentation for sand- and dust-
transport and wind measurements, often using optical

means (Fig. 17.13 ) has been tested.
In order to replicate Venus conditions (or at least come
close), very serious hardware is needed. Whilst replicating
Mars conditions on a large scale in Marswit was enabled by
the presence of an unused facility which was endowed with
the capability to pump down to low pressures, the genera-
tion of high pressure and high temperature characteristic of
Venus cannot be done on such a large scale (Fig. 7.14 ).